Over £100K to help local homeless

December 23, 2015 by Southend Borough Council

Over £100K to help local homeless

Tuesday 22nd December 2015

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council has successfully bid for £108,622 from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and Department of Health (DoH) to provide targeted support for homeless people with complex needs. The successful bids were announced earlier today.

The funding will be used to divide an existing homeless hostel in Southcurch Avenue to provide ten units of self-contained accommodation for this particular group of homeless people.

Cllr Martin Terry, Deputy Executive Councillor for Housing, says:
“This funding is excellent news and will help us to support a group that are often the most challenging to engage with, work with and source accommodation for.

“As well as providing self-contained accommodation, the funding will also allow us to provide training and assessment facilities for use by all of Southend’s homeless.

“This will provide Southend with the ability to use a pioneering approach to address the housing needs of some of our most complex and vulnerable homeless and rough sleepers in the Borough.

“There is no doubting that, and as with many local authorities, we are facing pressure on our homelessness service, with an added demand for services, coupled with diminishing resources. It is not an easy situation so funding like this can only be welcomed. Two other Southend projects were also successful which means that 3 out of 60 projects funded nationally are in here in Southend which is also great news.”

The full list of successful bids can be found here – this list highlights the two other Southend-on-Sea projects successful under the Platform for Life allocations.